What is the city but the people?–- Shakespeare

My neighbor Roy (pictured here) recalls driving his aunt Emma Amiss‘ dairy cow from her house on Woolen Mills Road to the pasture on the south side of the railroad tracks via this lane. Back then, Roy remembers the cow-herding as challenging, as this was a dog-trot, a rustic footpath with stones in the way.

Today, this isn’t an easy or safe path because of traffic short-cutting through the neighborhood. The street here, Franklin, is a neighborhood street, carrying around 1,600 vehicles per day. Of those vehicles, 74 percent are not local traffic, traffic arising from the neighborhoods on either side of the railroad tracks; they are from elsewhere. They are piloted by Outlanders cutting through, using neighborhood streets to avoid the pesky street lights on the arterial streets and collector roads.

There are over fifty mentions of sidewalks in Charlottesville’s Comprehensive Plan, but which pedestrians are blessed? If Franklin passed through nice neighborhoods, it is likely that these issues (pedestrian safety and cut-throughs) would have been addressed long ago. What do I mean by nice neighborhoods? Neighborhoods with some money.~Bill Emory puts up a new photo every day at billemory.com/blog.